Last week the House voted for the 2026 US military budget HR 7148, approving the proposed $840 billion for military spending requested from the Trump Administration.
The vote passed in the House 341 – 88, with 2 members not voting. There were 149 Democrats voting for Trump’s military budget, including Rep. Hillary Scholten. In fact, according to the vote breakdown every Michigan House member voted with Trump, except Rep. Tlaib.
Rep. Scholten never mentions on her Facebook page that she voted with the Trump Administration for the $840 billion in military spending, yet she likes to complain about the Trump Administration regularly. On January 24th, Scholten made the comment that “Congress is not working the way it should,” yet she voted in favor of militarism and US Imperialism with the majority of House members.
Rep. Schoten’s vote on the US military budget is consist, in that she has voted for the massive US military budget every year since she joined Congress in 2023. In addition, the majority of House Democrats voting with the Trump Administration’s proposal for $840 billion demonstrates once again that they are not an opposition party.
Considering that the Trump Administration has continued to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza, is seeking to use social unrest in Iran to justify a US intervention, the US military’s kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Maduro, the threat to invade and occupy Greenland, and so many other overt forms of US imperialism, one would think that politicians would not want to rubber stamp $840 billion more for US militarism.
Rep. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Il) voted no on the 2026 US military budget stating:
“As long as we are funding imperialism and authoritarianism while working people can’t afford the high cost of living. I will stand opposed.”
This is the right stance to take, since $2.01 billion in taxes leaves the 3rd Congressional district every year to fund US militarism. Imagine if that money was spent on meeting the needs of people in Rep. Scholten’s District. Unfortunately, voting for the $840 billion military budget demonstrates that Rep. Scholten is more committed to US imperialism than she is to making sure that people in her district have their basic needs met.
Misinformation and the 6 sanctuary policies that Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are demanding from the City and the County
I have seen over the past few weeks comments from people who are not involved in the struggle for immigrant justice, particularly white people who feel compelled to share their own thoughts about the 6 sanctuary polices that Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE are demanding from the City of Grand Rapids and Kent County.
Some of it is the same old argument that being a sanctuary city or county will bring the wrath of the Trump Administration. First, this effort is not, and I repeat, NOT calling for the City or County to declare themselves a sanctuary. These two groups are calling on the City and the County to adopt 6 specific policies that would prevent those two governing bodies and the cops that work for them to not collaborate with ICE in any way. Think of these 6 sanctuary policies as public safety policies or harm reduction policies. Second, ICE has three offices in Grand Rapids and is adding a fourth office with more ICE agents. ICE has been terrorizing undocumented immigrants since 2003 in this community and Cosecha & GR Rapid Response to ICE has seen a significant increase in ICE activity since last June. Therefore, the wrath of the current administration is already being felt by members of the affected community.
Just days after 5 people were arrested at the Kent County Sheriff’s office to draw attention to the fact that the Kent County Jail is holding immigrants for ICE and to demand that they end this practice, these same people and another 20 people attended the January 8th Kent County Commission meeting to push the 6 sanctuary policies. I wrote about that meeting, where the primary response was that the county doesn’t enforcement immigration policies. Again, people are not asking them to enforce immigration policies, they are demanding that Kent County adopt policies which will signify that all county employee will not share information or cooperate in any way with ICE. As I stated before these are public safety and harm reduction demands.
During Tuesday night’s Grand Rapids City Commission meeting, Mayor LaGrand made some comments which were rather instructive and infuriating (Listen to the Mayor’s comments at 13:00 into the video).
First, Mayor LaGrand made comments critical of the Trump Administration, suggesting that the harm done to undocumented immigrants are because of the current administration. While it is true that the Trump Administration has escalated anti-immigrant rhetoric and funding for ICE, ICE has been brutalizing immigrant communities since they were founded in 2003.
Second, LaGrand responding to the 6 sanctuary policy demands suggested some of those demands are already being done, specifically by the GRPD. LaGrand read some of the GRPD practices related to immigration status (all of which you can read here)
“No member of the GRPD shall coerce, threaten with deportation, or engage in verbal abuse of any person based on that person(s)… actual or perceived immigration status or citizenship”
“No member of the GRPD shall inquire into a person’s immigration status when the person is seeking police services…”
“No member of the GRPD will stop, question, investigate, arrest, search, or detain an individual based solely on actual or suspected immigration status… including an immigration detainer, administrative immigration warrant, prior deportation order, or other civil immigration document”
However, none of what LaGrand said is the same as the 6 demands from Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE. Again, see the imagine above. Mayor LaGrand went on to talk about human rights and liberty and how he will shout some of the GRPD immigration-related policies from the rooftops. Look politicians can use whatever rhetoric they want, but this means little while immigrants in this city and this county are living in constant fear, while immigrant families are being separated in this community, while immigrant children are being traumatized by seeing a parent taken away, and while immigrant families find themselves in a position of economic hardship, because the primary income earners have been taken by ICE.
Equally important is the fact that members of Cosecha and GR Rapid Response have witnessed the GRPD and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department cooperate and collaborate with ICE, along with documented evidence. You can engage in as much rhetoric as you want and have police policies that the city decided on, but the reality is that the City and the County are collaborating with ICE on a regular basis.
Towards the end of the City Commission meeting (1:40:00 into the video), Mayor LaGrand said that none of us can outsource democracy, meaning we all have an obligation to practice democracy. This is insulting to lots of people in the city who are dedicated and committed practitioners of democratic principals. As someone who has been involved in GR Rapid Response to ICE since 2017, I have seen hundreds of people do the work to try to prevent ICE from taking immigrants, people accompanying immigrants to appointments when they don’t feel safe in public, doing patrols in neighborhoods where ICE has been sighted, providing transportation, food, diapers and funds so that immigrant families can survive after a loved one has been arrested, set to a detention center and often deported. People do this work are not relying on the government or any other institution to do it, because they are doing it and not just talking about it.
Lastly, the evolution of how Mayor LaGrand has responded to these demands to adopt 6 sanctuary policies is instructive. In January of 2025, when the community generated over 3,000 letters to the City, LaGrand said that he wasn’t hearing from the immigrant community. This is absurd, since Cosecha’s members are part of the immigrant community.
In March of 2025, during another GR City Commission meeting, the Mayor said he didn’t want to give immigrants a false sense of hope.
In May, during the annual May Day march that Cosecha organizes, the GRPD threatened people with arrest before they marched and the arrested two people who were doing crowd safety.
In June, the GRPD showed up to harass and threaten members of GR Rapid Response to ICE that showed up when ICE arrested 8 people going to their appointments at the ISAP office at 545 Michigan.
In late July, people spoke for 2 hours during the City Commission meeting and then engaged in street theater and other forms of disruption, where Mayor LaGrand threatened to have people arrested if they didn’t leave. In September, Mayor LaGrand said some awful stuff about Cosecha and the sanctuary policy demands, which was followed up by a forum hosted by Cosecha where all City and Kent County Commissioners were invited to hear directly from immigrants affected by ICE violence. Because the low commissioner turnout, Cosecha then began a campaign to boycott the businesses owned by Mayor LaGrand beginning in October. This action was followed up by a second action that was at another Long Road Distillers location in November.
In December, Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE attended an event hosted by Mayor LaGrand, which resulted in him giving a verbal commitment to talking with city commissioners about adopting sanctuary policies. Now Mayor LaGrand is saying that the city is fulfilling some of the demands from Cosecha. So, what’s next? Will the Mayor start claiming that he and the GRPD are actually keeping immigrants safe from ICE? Stay tuned.
Of course, if you want to become involved in the campaigns to get the City of Grand Rapids and Kent County to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies, contact Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE.
Editor’s Note: GRIID conducted a recent interview with Pastor Shannon Jammal-Hollemans, who spent several days in Minneapolis as part of the invite from organizers in that city to have people come there to be part of the resistance against ICE.
GRIID – What motivated you to go to Minneapolis and be part of the resistance to ICE terrorism?
I went because I am concerned for my neighbors, and my country. A group of organizers called MARCH Minnesota–which stands for Multifaith, Antiracist, Change & Healing–put out a call for clergy and faith leaders to come and stand in witness and solidarity with them in Minneapolis. They had the idea on a Thursday, put the call out the next day, and by Monday more than 650 leaders had registered to go. They had another 700 who wanted to be part of the action but who the organizers could not accommodate them.
I considered the call seriously, and I went to church that Sunday morning still on the Fence about it. But when my congregation heard I was thinking about going, they threw their full support behind me. By the end of the service they had collected more than $700 to send me to Minneapolis and they said a blessing over me to send me off.
Faith leaders have a responsibility to say what is true, especially when lies are being used to justify violence. As many of us know, it is painful to stand by and watch from a distance while this is happening, so I was so grateful to the organizers for inviting faith leaders to join them in faithful witness.
GRIID – What were some of the things happening on the ground that inspired you during the time you were in Minneapolis?
Over the course of our first day together we heard poetry, sang songs, and listened to story after story after story from those working on the ground to protect and serve those who are being impacted by violence right now. We participated in trainings to equip us for the work of faithful witness we would be doing in Minneapolis AND the trained, sustained resistance to authoritarianism we are doing in our own communities.
Minneapolis is a city that is all too familiar with violence. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 changed life there. But something we heard over and over again as we heard from those living in Minneapolis right now is “This feels different.” When the chief of police threatens to fire any officer who does not intervene when ICE is harming people, I know this is different.
I cannot get the stories that I heard in Minneapolis out of my head–the story of a mother and her two children chased by ICE officers to her home, escaping by mere seconds; or the story of a four year-old U.S. citizen, whose mother is a U.S. citizen, who has not left her home since November for fear of being kidnapped by our government because her father is not a citizen; or the story of the mother of a 3 month-old infant whose mother was kidnapped, leaving her child behind. This is horrific.
But the stories of resistance are also staying with me. Women are coming together to donate breast milk to that 3 month-old baby whose mother was kidnapped by ICE. People are mobilizing to help in any way they can–those with disabilities and confined to their homes are watching from their windows and managing communications; trained witnesses are following ICE and recording their activities for accountability; and trained citizens are organizing to are put themselves in harm’s way to protect those who are being kidnapped by our federal government.
Minneapolis showed me that effective resistance isn’t spontaneous—it’s learned, practiced, and disciplined. People don’t just show up brave. They show up prepared.
On Thursday evening, I had dinner at an immigrant-owned restaurant in Minneapolis. When talking with the server, I noticed the whistle she was wearing around her neck. Local resisters wear whistles around their necks to alert people to the presence of ICE. I shared with her why we were in town, and she got choked up. “Thank you….thank you for being here. Thank you for standing witness.”
What I saw clearly while in Minneapolis was that the actions being taken by ICE agents are not about immigration. They are about authoritarianism. They are targeting black and brown communities indiscriminately. Indigenous people with protected status are being kidnapped and held because they are standing witness and offering protection. All of us have the power to respond to this threat to our country in one way or another. Sometimes we need to lend one another the courage to do it.
GRIID – What actions did you take part in and can you describe what that (or those) actions looked like?
Our group of faith leaders and clergy divided up among several locations on Friday to take action. Some went to deliver groceries to families trapped in their homes. Others staged a sit-in at U.S. Bank where they successfully demanded to talk with the CEO to share their concerns. Another group had a “sing-in” at a local Target store to protest the ways Target has been cooperating with ICE agents in the city. And a large contingent went to the Minneapolis airport to pray in protest of the three flights a day that are leaving the city with people being kidnapped by ICE agents. One of my colleagues was among the 100 who were arrested.
I went to a local church in Minneapolis where a group of us rabbis, pastors and priests walked around the neighborhood and sang both as a way to deter the presence of ICE and let the people locked in their homes know that we were with them. As we walked, home alarms went off, and the lights on exterior cameras turned on. We know they saw us and heard us, and we lamented the fear that they live in right now.
When we were back in the church, listening to the stories of those taking immense risks to protect their neighbors, the church went on lockdown because of ICE activity several blocks away. Someone was taken, and people were harmed in the process. The church operates a free medical clinic in its basement since people are not safe going to the hospital. We sat there as the injured were treated downstairs, and the rabbis led us in saying a blessing over the people taking these risks and the people receiving treatment downstairs.
While we were in the church, a group of our clergy colleagues were traveling by bus from the site of George Floyd’s murder to the site of Renee Good’s murder. They did not notice the vehicle of ICE agents that was following them. A group of local organizers began to follow the vehicle of ICE agents, and after a while, the ICE agents abruptly stopped their vehicle, got out, and smashed the drivers side window of the vehicle carrying the organizers who were following them. This is terrorism.
Friday afternoon we were among the 50,000 people who marched through the streets of Minneapolis demanding accountability, transparency, and an end to the use of force that has already cost so many lives in Minneapolis and around the country. It was minus twelve degrees Fahrenheit but the positive energy of those of us who gathered and marched was incredible. We were a diverse group, and our coming together did not erase our diversity, but showed the power we have when diverse groups of people unite for the common good. I consider that sacred and holy work.
GRIID – What was your reaction when you heard that ICE had shot and killed Alex Pretti?
I was driving home on Saturday morning when the other clergy in my car saw on our Signal chat that Alex Pretti had been shot and killed. Because we were connected to the groups on the ground there, we heard within minutes of it happening, before local media had even caught wind of the news. And we were stunned–not surprised–but stunned, and angry. We sat in silence for a bit until I finally said the words that were running through each of our minds,“Should I turn around?”
We considered it together. We stopped for lunch with the other car of clergy we had traveled with, and we concluded that we were where we needed to be in that moment.
The organizers asked anyone who was still in the city to stay if they were able to, to serve as movement chaplains to those impacted by the murder. More than a dozen responded that they were able to stay and offer support.
GRIID – What did you learn about the power of organized resistance while in Minneapolis and what can you encourage people to do/replicate here in West Michigan?
My time in Minneapolis taught me that resisting authoritarianism requires trained, sustained resistance—grounded in truth-telling and faithful witness. Faithful witness means naming what must change, not just what we oppose. The movement in Minneapolis is absolutely breathtaking, and it is working. It is also adaptable and completely replicable in our communities.
ICE agents must be held legally accountable for their crimes. Federal funding for ICE must be cut. ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional rights violations of Americans and our neighbors. National companies must commit to becoming 4th Amendment businesses, ceasing economic relations with ICE, and refusing ICE entry or use of their property for staging grounds.
Editor’s Note: I would encourage people in Kent County to get involved in the work of Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE.
Why are white people so pissed off about ICE now? On why we need to come to terms with US history and learn from BIPOC communities
There is an overwhelming amount of chatter on social media over the ICE infiltration of Minneapolis and the recent ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Of course all of this is understandable, but at the same time much of it can be problematic. Why is it that it took white people getting killed by ICE for people to wake up? Undocumented immigrants have been killed by ICE agents or in ICE detention facilities by the hundreds since ICE was created in 2003?
White people and the politicians they have voted for – both Democrats and Republicans – have been approving billions in funding for ICE since 2003, while undocumented immigrants were being arrested, detained and deported, along with hundreds being killed. You can read about these immigrant deaths by reading reports from Detention Watch Network and the ACLU.
What I want to address today is the response from so many people who say what ICE is doing is not very American, when in fact it is exactly what America has done since this country was founded. I saw this fabulous post from someone on social media in recent days, which is included here above.
The person who posted this is BIPOC and also included the following commentary about the above post.
“This isn’t a conversation about semantics or word choices. This is a conversation about history, about accountability, about ownership. This is who the US is. This is who the US has always been.”
I was so moved by the post and wanted to expand our understanding of US history, by looking more deeply at the examples included in the statement above.
ICE is not the gestapo – If you read Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Whitman, you will find out that the Nazi regime learned directly from what the power structure in the US was doing to BIPOC communities in the US. In Hitler’s American Model, the author says that a great deal of the policies that the Nazi Party adopted that not only vilified Jewish people, but also demonized Roma, the queer community, immigrants and non-Aryan people, were based in large part on what they learned from policies in the US. Whitman states:
The 1920 Party Program called for sharp limits on citizenship, which was to be restricted to persons of “German blood,” along with a scheme of disabilities for resident foreigners, who were to be threatened with expulsion.
When the US adopted the the Naturalization Act of 1790, it opened naturalization to “any alien, being a free white person.” The Nazi Party learned from this as well as US immigration laws that were adopted in 1921 (Emergency Quota Act – which limited the amount of immigrants into the US) and 1924 (The Immigration Act of 1924), which prevented immigration from Asia and put limitations on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Nazi Party were paying attention to both of those US immigration policies and and wove them into their own citizenship law that emerged in 1935.
Whitman’s book relies heavily on Nazi Party internal documents, which included comments from Nazi strategists who said they thought that, “the US was too extreme in some of their laws.”
ICE is the descendant of slave patrols – Slave patrols were a legalized mechanism developed in the south to police Black people who were enslaved whenever they fled slave plantations. Throughout South Carolina, town after town asked the state legislature to transfer control of the slave patrols from the county courts or state militia to the local government. Camden won that power in 1818. Columbia followed in 1823. Georgetown requested it in 1810, but was not allowed it until 1829. Ten years later, the legislature granted all incorporated South Carolina towns the power to regulate patrol duty. According to Kristian Williams book, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, modern day policing grew out of the slave patrols system.
ICE is the descendant of the indigenous child abductors for boarding schools – The US was founded on Settler Colonialism, where Indigenous people were killed and dispossessed from their land. In addition, Indigenous children became the target of abductions in order to place them into what are euphemistically referred to as boarding schools. US Captain Richard Henry Pratt delivered a speech in 1892, where he famously said, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The ideas expressed in Pratt’s speech are central to the development of the Carlisle Indian School (founded 1879) and other boarding schools across the country, which aimed to “civilize” and “Americanize” the Indian. See the book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror, by Laura Briggs, along with Kill the Indian, Save the Man, by Ward Churchill.
ICE is the descendant of the Jim Crow South law enforcement – The policing of Black people during the time of Jim Crow led to the early stages of mass incarceration, along with the hideous reality of lynchings that took place throughout the country. See Adolph Reed Jr.’s book, The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, along with the incredible book by Ida B. 
Wells on lynching, The Red Record.
ICE is the descendent of night riders – Night riders is a term used to describe groups of white US citizens who didn’t want to allow Black people to achieve any form of justice and equality. Most people are familiar with the KKK, but there were also groups known as the Red Shirts and the White League, which was paramilitary organization that acted as a military arm of the Democratic Party. Of course, these were early iterations of night rider groups, which still exist through the country. See James Ridgeway’s book, Blood in the Face: White Nationalism from the Birth of a Nation to the Age of Trump, and Leonard Zeskind’s book, Blood and Politics: The History of The White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.
Of course there are a great deal more examples, but to re-emphasize the final points of the graphic above, we all need to learn from and listen to BIPOC voices and lived experiences.
Before the U.S looks to anyone else’s history to equate what ICE is like, the U.S. needs to remember its own history. And remember that many modern day atrocities were inspired by how this country treated its marginalized.
Resistance as an act of solidarity, resistance as an act of deep love in Kent County
Editor’s note – On Sunday morning I was asked to give the homily at All Souls Community Church. The theme I was asked to speak on was resistance.
Good morning everyone. Thanks for braving the cold. I was invited by Pastor Greta Jo to come and talk with you all this morning about resistance work, specifically resistance to oppression. I want to start off by reading some wisdom from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”
These words from Dr. King were spoken in 1967, in his Beyond Vietnam speech, but they could very easily have been spoken today, especially since the US continues to spend $1 trillion on militarism, which is more than the next 10 largest military budgets around the world combined, along with daily state carceral violence at the hands of law enforcement agencies against Black communities, Latinx communities , poor communities and increasingly against undocumented immigrants.
The theme of my reflection today is centered around the idea of resistance, specifically resistance to systems of oppression. Again, Dr. King can provide us with some insight. In that same 1967 speech I referenced earlier, Dr. King said:
“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”
The system of oppression that Dr. King is referring to is the economic system of Capitalism, s system which primarily benefits the Capitalist Class, the millionaires and billionaires.
There is certainly no shortage of systems of oppression that we need to resist, like militarism, white supremacy, colonialism, transphobia, patriarchy and state carceral violence. These systems are structural and institutional, which means it will take a great deal to not only resist them, but to dismantle them.
Now in order to resist systems of oppression we need to determine what our goals are, meaning what do we want, and what kind of world do we want to live in. We then need to develop strategies and implement tactics in order to achieve those goals. As someone who has been organizing for nearly 5 decades in Grand Rapids, too often what people do when they are angered is they protest. They hold signs, they march, they have rallies and then they go home. The problem is that protesting more often than not is performative, it is symbolic and it rarely leads to change. Why, because protesting is not resistance. In fact, protesting more often than not is reacting to some atrocity, and when we react we tend not to think strategically.
Right now, what thousands of people are doing in Minneapolis, is resistance, which involves a general strike, shutting down commerce, blockading the ICE office, and people in the streets disrupting business as usual, so that ICE cannot kidnapped more undocumented immigrants. I’m not saying that protesting ICE is bad, but what if we redirected our energy in a strategic way, in a way that would directly benefit the very people that ICE is targeting – undocumented immigrants.
I am part of the core team with GR Rapid Response to ICE. We work directly with the immigrant-led group Movimiento Cosecha and do what they ask of us. As the Zapatista movement says, “We lead by following.” Right now, here is how GR Rapid Response is resisting ICE in Kent County.
- First we build relationships with undocumented immigrants, then listen to what they want, so that they could keep themselves and their families safe.
- Second, we respond to calls on our hotline for direct intervention when ICE attempts to kidnap undocumented immigrants in Kent County.
- Third, we accompany immigrants who have appointments at the ISAP office at 545 Michigan, the ICE office at 517 Ottawa and during court appointments, in order to reduce the chance of being taken by ICE during those appointments.
- Fourth, we are doing patrols in neighborhoods where immigrants live/work and where immigrants have told us that they have seen ICE operating. We do this on a daily basis in 6 different neighborhoods as a way to prevent ICE attempts to kidnap members of the affected community.
- We work with faith communities, community centers, non-profits and other entities that would declare themselves as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants and then provide safe houses for them to stay in when they no longer feel safe where they live.
- We work directly with Cosecha on organized campaigns to get local government bodies to adopt sanctuary policies that would make it harder for ICE to arrest and detain immigrants by not collaborating with ICE. We are currently doing this with Kent County and the City of Grand Rapids. The Kent County Sheriff’s office is conducting ICE holds at the Kent County Jail. Five of us were arrested for occupying the Sheriff’s office to draw attention to the fact that they are collaborating with ICE by conducting holds for ICE. At the City level there is a boycott of Mayor LaGrand’s businesses, since he refuses to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that Cosecha has been demanding.
- We provide mutual aid to families that were directly impacted by ICE violence with transportation, material aid, financial aid and legal support for those being detained. Author and organizer Dean Spade says, “Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.” This is what distinguishes Mutual aid from charity.
For people to be part of this work they have to attend a training, so we are better prepared to show up in solidarity for affected communities and to make sure that we don’t practice white saviorism. We as volunteers do not arrive as protectors of the vulnerable, but as co-conspirators. The language of “defending immigrants” often reproduces the very hierarchies we aim to dismantle, casting some as saviors and others as saved. This reproduces the “false generosity” of liberalism, one that preserves systems of domination under the guise of aid. Instead, we align ourselves with an ethic of solidarity, not saviorism.
Resistance then should be seen as an act of solidarity and deep love.
So what can you do right now to resist ICE in Kent County?
- You can share and donate to the Mutual Aid requests on the GR Rapid Response to ICE Facebook page.
- You can sign up for a training.
- You can get your faith community to host a training and work to declare themselves a sanctuary.
- You can attend the Melt ICE concert at Fountain Street Church on February 15, with live music and ticket sales going to families affected by ICE violence.
- Attend or host a workshop we do on the history of US immigration policy, so we can better understand the historical context for what ICE is doing.
- Lastly, you can join Movimiento Cosecha’s campaigns to pressure Kent County and the City of Grand Rapids to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that will make sure that the GRPD and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department doesn’t collaborate with ICE.
I am well aware of the fact that what ICE has been doing recently seems so outrageous, but the fact of the matter is that ICE has been arresting, detaining and deporting over 10 million immigrants since they were founded in 2003 and most of the people killed by ICE have been immigrants, either shot or died while in detention facilities. The biggest difference now is that the have a much larger budget to engage in brutally repressive actions primarily against affected communities. I also know that two non-immigrants have been killed in recent weeks in Minneapolis, but I want to emphasize again that there have been hundreds of undocumented immigrants that have been killed by ICE agents, either using lethal force or while they have been in detention centers. Where was the outrage when immigrants were killed?
I get that you might be afraid to get involved and to take risks, but no social movement in the history of this country has ever changed anything without taking risks. So let us be bold in our words and our actions, even if it means we take risks to our own well being. As the late Archbishop of El Salvador Oscar Romero reminds us, “We must not love our lives so much that we avoid taking the risks in life that history calls for.” History is calling for it NOW!
GRIID Class on US Foreign Policy since WWII – Week #2
In week #1, I provided some foundational documents and a framework for how to look at no what country the US is engaged in. I also used the framework document to assess the history of Iraq, particularly the US relationship with that country.
For week #2 we began using William Blum’s book, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since WWII, using a PDF version of he book. I had participants read chapters 2, 9 and 10, with how the US interfered with the elections in Italy in 1947-48, the CIA coup in Iran in 1953, and the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954.
1947-48 Italian Elections
The US embraced a virulent anti-Communist stance after WWII, which played a major role in US foreign policy until the collapse of the Soviet Union decades later. In fact, towards the end of WWII, US troops played a vital role in undermining anti-fascist efforts in Italy. Noam Chomsky notes in his book, Deterring Democracy, US and and British military forces actively removed the socialist, anarchist and communist movements that had defeated the fascists in Europe. Chomsky states that these antifascist forces were often replaced by fascists collaborators they had defeated, “to weaken unions and other popular organizations, and to block the threat of radical democracy and social reform.” The fascist collaborators were more inclined to embrace capitalism and the social order that came with it, which means that the US and British military ended up being complicit with fascism by putting fascist collaborators in charge of cities in France, Italy and Germany.
With Italy there were several political parties like the Popular Democratic Front (PDF) that included those who embraced both socialist and communist beliefs. The US feared that Italy would have a socialist/communist government after the elections, so they invested a great deal of money, propaganda and other tactics to prevent the PDF from winning. Here is a short sample of some of the tactics that the US government used:
These tactics and many more resulted in the PDF losing the election and the Christian Democrats won, the party that the US was backing.
Iran 1953
The Iranian people and the Iranian government as early as 1951 wanted to nationalize the oil that was being pumped from the earth on Iranian land. Such an action was a major no no, since the oil interests (both British and US) were not in favor of allowing Iranians to benefit from domestic oil production.
The British initiated an economic blockade on Iran once they announced that Iranian oil was for Iranians. However, the Iranian government under the leadership of the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh was able to weather the economic blockade and continued to use oil production to benefit Iranian society. US strategists working with the CIA began developing a plan to oust the Mosaddegh government and put in his place the Shah, who would dismantle the law that said Iranian oil for Iranians.
In the summer of 1953, the CIA initiated a coup and then installed The Shah of Iran who became an important ally of the US in the Middle East until 1979. During the Shah’s reign he suppressed dissent, was very anti-Islam and created his own secret police known as SAVAK. According to Blum:
“The notorious Iranian secret police, SAVAK, created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel, spread its tentacles all over the world to punish Iranian dissidents. According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, SAVAK was instructed in torture techniques by the Agency. Amnesty International summed up the situation in 1976 by noting that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”
The brutality of the Shah of Iran is what eventually led to the Iranian revolution in 1979, which was led by Islamic clerics who had nothing but contempt for the US, primarily because of the decades long US support of the Shah.
For more insights into the history of US/Iranian relations check out the US government declassified documents put together by the National Security Archives. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/iran-us-relations
Guatemala 1954
The third example we looked at for week #2 was the Central American country of Guatemala. Guatemala was historically one of the “banana republics” of Central America. The United Fruit Company had tremendous control in Guatemala that it was nicknamed El Pulpos – The Octopus, because they had their tentacles in everything.
However, with the elections of 1944 Guatemala was becoming more democratic, with the victory of Arevalo, ushering in what Guatemalans call Los dies anos de la Primavera – The ten years of Spring. A former military man, Jacobo Arbenz was elected in 1951 and sought to continue the reforms that began in 1944. Land reform was a major issue and the Guatemalan government appropriated land that the United Fruit Company was not using and paid them the same value the company had listed for tax purposes.
However, the United Fruit Company was not going to let the Guatemalan government to use land for the betterment of its own people. There were numerous people in the Eisenhower Administration that had a long history with the United Fruit Company, so they devised a plan to use the CIA to overthrow the government and did so in the summer of 1954. The CIA installed a Colonel named Castillio Armas that was willing to be a puppet for the US government and US interests.
After the 1954 CIA coup, the Guatemalan military ran the country with one dictator after another until there was eventually peace accords signed in 1995. However, to this day the 60% majority Mayan population still suffers from poverty and racism, with US interests still being a driving factor, especially after Guatemala signed on to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2005.
For more on the CIA coup in Guatemala and the consequences of that coup check out the declassified US government documents from the National Security Archives. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/guatemala-project
The 5 arrested at Kent County Sheriff’s Office over ICE holds at the Kent County Jail plead not guilty at their arraignment
Editors note: I was one of the five that was arrested on January 5th.
On Wednesday, the five people who were arrested on January 5th for occupying the Kent County Sheriff’s office to draw attention to the fact that Kent County is holding immigrants at the jail for ICE, plead not guilty to the charge of trespass.
“We all plead not guilty because in our minds were engaging in an act of harm reduction, specifically to reduce the number of immigrants who end up in ICE custody in Kent County. The Kent County Sheriff’s Office through the Kent County Jail is holding people at the jail for ICE, which then transfers them to a detention center. Kent County Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young has refused to publicly acknowledge that her officers are collaborating with ICE to hold immigrants in the jail for ICE agents. This often happens after family members and supporters pay money to bond them out, but then are told that the jail will not release them, since they are holding then for ICE.
According to a recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative, “the federal government nonetheless relies heavily on state and local collaboration to enact its mass deportation agenda.” We have know for months now that the Kent County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the Kent County Jail, has been holding immigrants for ICE. ICE then sends them to the detention center in Baldwin, Michigan resulting in immigrant family separation and immigrant family trauma.
The five of us acted in solidarity with the affected community and were following the lead of Movimiento Cosecha to engage in a non-violent act by occupying the Kent County Sheriff’s office. The five of us acted to draw attention and to apply more pressure to Kent County officials to adopt the 6 sanctuary policies that Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have been demanding since the beginning of 2025.”
The six sanctuary policies are:
- Policies restricting the ability of state and local police to make arrests for federal immigration violations, or to detain individuals on civil immigration warrants.
- Policies restricting the police or other county workers from asking about immigration status.
- Policies prohibiting “287(g)” agreements through which ICE deputizes local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law.
- Policies that prevent local governments from entering into a contract with the federal government to hold immigrants in detention.
- Policies preventing immigration detention centers from being established in Kent County, which would include the use of the Kent County Jail as a detention facility for ICE.
- A policy that will not allow the Kent County Sheriff’s Department to share Flock camera images or any other information gathered by county staff with ICE or any other law enforcement agency seeking to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.
We are also inviting other allies/accomplices in the struggle for immigrant justice to be part of this movement and to take bold actions with us in the future to resist ICE in Grand Rapids and Kent County.
Movimiento Cosecha hosted a short online discussion with the 5 arrested, where they shared why they were willing to risk arrest. You can watch that discussion here.
It is always instructive to see how people in positions of power craft narratives in ways that benefits them. In a recent post on Facebook, State Rep. Phil Skaggs, who is running to become a State Senator, wrote the following narrative about what happened 6 years ago regarding the ICE contract that Kent County had, while Skaggs was a County Commissioner.
I will include comments and hyperlinks to GRIID articles that provides a counter-narrative to what Skaggs wants us to believe that will be in black. Here is a link to a People’s History of the End the Contract with ICE campaign, which provides an overview of all the things this campaign included. 
Also, before reading the narrative, Skaggs also included the following image of Dr. King and a quote from him, including a picture of Kent County Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young, thus equating her as modeling King’s comment, which I find rather insulting. Also, make sure you read Cosecha’s response to the post from Skaggs, which is at the very end.
Six years ago today, Kent County Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young announced a new policy to no longer honor federal immigration holds (Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers) without an arrest warrant signed by a federal judge. The new policy meant that the county jail would not hold people past their legal stay (the end of their sentence or release on bail) on local charges if ICE was not able to provide a valid judicial warrant. (The reason why the Sheriff made this decision was largely due the tremendous pressure that Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE had been putting on Kent County officials and the Sheriff that began in June of 2018.)
The move effectively ended the Sheriff’s 287(g) Agreement (“Contract”) with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that had been in place since renew. It became national news. This wasn’t a deep-Blue county, Kent County had a Republican sheriff and a Republican majority on the County Commission.
But, there is much more to the story. I’ve been reluctant to tell that entire story because it might inadvertently harm colleagues and limit opportunities to effectively cooperate on future issues. But, time has passed and, while the issue has gotten far worse, I think it’s a moment when it’s prudent to write what I saw and did. It isn’t the full story, that would take a fuller investigation by a journalist or historian, but I think it adds some information to this important reform.
The change in policy was sparked by the circumstances around the detention of Jilmar Ramos-Gomez. Ramos-Gomez, a United States citizen and Marine Corps veteran was wrongfully turned over by the Kent County Sheriff to ICE for deportation proceedings and was sent by ICE to the detention facility in Battle Creek. Ramos-Gomez, who suffered from PTSD as a result of his military service in Afghanistan, was arrested by the Grand Rapids police in 2018 after trespassing at a local hospital. Curt VanderKooi – an off-duty GR police captain – learned about Ramos-Gomez from a local news story and asked ICE to check his “status,” despite having no reason to think he was undocumented other than his name and appearance (I’m leaving out the entire GRPD part of the story, but it too led to policy changes after some really bad actions were uncovered) . Based on this tip, ICE issued a non-judicial immigration detainer request for Ramos-Gomez, resulting in the Kent County Jail placing him in federal custody. We’ll pick that story up later, but now is the time to place it in the context of the time. (Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE were working directly with the ACLU and MIRC on the Jilmar Ramos-Gomez case, which you can read here. In addition Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE were pressuring the Grand Rapids City Commission to fire GRPD Captain VanderKooi for engaging in racial profiling and calling ICE. I also wrote a story about the history that GRPD Captain VanderKooi had with ICE. VanderKooi was exonerated for any wrong doing, but then in May of 2019, the Grand Rapids Civilian Appeals Board reversed that decision on the grounds that VanderKooi engaged in racial profiling.)
About six months earlier, beginning on 28 June 2018 (narrative of what actually happened), Movimiento Cosecha began protesting at County Commission meetings, calling on us commissioners to end the contract with ICE. While Cosecha did succeed in dramatically bringing the issue to the public, their disruptive tactics alienated the majority of commissioners, especially Republican leadership. (When people who are directly affected by ICE terrorism aren’t taken seriously, they will use disruptive tactics to demonstrate the urgency of what they are facing. To the degree that County Commissioners were alienated, was a demonstration that they didn’t care that immigrant families were being separated. Here is an example of how the End the Contract campaign confronted County officials.) In addition, there belief that the commission could end the contract was legally mistaken. The elected Sheriff was the only official with authority. Still, those of us sympathetic to the issue began to work to see if we could accomplish the goals of the protest from behind the scenes. But, we ran into several obstacles. (Skaggs also leaves out important context here, especially about he behaved towards Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE members. Almost all of the Democrats on the County Commission fought the movement to end the contract. Skaggs in particular engaged in gaslighting of some of the latinx organizers and made no public effort to support our demands or work to End the Contract even after more than a year of demanding they work to end the contract. Skaggs even mocked the very organizers of the End the Contract Campaign, often referring to what we were doing as Bolshevik cosplay.)
First, the sheriff at the time was Larry Stelma, a hardliner on immigration who had signed onto a March 2018 letter from the National Sheriff’s Association which took a hardline in support of cracking down on undocumented immigrants in the American interior. There would be no opportunity at all to convince Stelma to exit a contract he had initially signed in 2012 and extended in 2017. However, among the Democrats on the Commission, it was well known that the 70-year old Stelma was on the verge of retirement and that Michelle LaJoye-Young was the likely successor. A strategy was devised to wait for Stelma’s retirement (which was announced in August and effective in November 2018) and try to lower the temperature in order to avoid a backlash that might lead Stelma or the Republican-dominated appointment committee to skip over LaJoye-Young and pick an immigration hardliner. The plan worked. LaJoye-Young was indeed appointed Sheriff in September 2018. Obstacle overcome. (Saying their plan worked is misleading. First, while the Democrats on the County Commission were buying time til Stelma retired immigrant families were being separated over and over again. Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young was not an improvement, since the same wealthy families that funded Stelma also continued to fund LaJoye-Young.
Second, the Chair of the Commission was still Jim Saalfeld, who was resolutely against Cosecha and, in control of the agenda, he was not going to allow any attempt to make an official call on the sheriff to end the special relationship with ICE. Thankfully, his term would end at in December 2019. Being the Vice Chair, it was widely known that Mandy Bolter would almost certainly be elected by the Republican caucus and then the full Kent County Commission to be the new Chair. Bolter was indeed nominated by her caucus in December 2018 and elected Chair at the 5 January 2019 board meeting. Obstacle overcome. (Just because the Republicans had the majority of the county seats during this campaign doesn’t excuse the Democrats for remaining silent, being antagonistic towards organizers, since they could have applied public pressure to the Sheriff and to the Commission chair to make ending the ICE contract a priority.)
Third, the County attorney was very clear with the Commission that we had absolutely no power to effect change. We could neither order the sheriff to change policy nor reduce the departmental budget in an attempt to leverage change (there was clear precedent of sheriffs successfully suing commissions that tried to use their budgetary power in an attempt to change policy). (This is the same bullshit answer that Kent County officials are using right now regarding the 6 sanctuary policies that Cosecha is demanding.) It’s extremely difficult to get a majority of a part-time commission to go against their in-house attorney (someday I’ll tell you about how I had to continually push to get Kent County to join the national opioid lawsuit until finally succeeding). In addition, the County had received a letter from the Trump administration threatening to withhold any and all funding from counties that did not “cooperate with ICE.” We had to take these threats seriously and consider the consequences for vulnerable members of our community if federal grants and funds were cut off for programs from rent and utility assistance to behavioral health supports. (Just more excuses instead of listening to members of the affected community and joining them is creating enough public pressure to end abusive policies and contracts.)
At this point, many commissioners were growing increasingly frustrated. We wanted to bring change, but we were dealing with a largely hostile Republican majority, a protest movement which was not interested engaging in strategic dialogues and which was demanding illegal actions from us, staff that was giving us legal advice that made reform impossible, and a Trump administration that was threatening important programs. (Much of what Skaggs is saying her is simply false, especially what he is saying about “the protest movement”. It was and is an immigrant justice movement and many of the members have conversations with County Commissioners, but those conversations always ended with them saying there was nothing they could do.)
At this point, I reached out to attorneys with the ACLU and the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center (MIRC) who I knew personally. (Wow, he knew them personally. The fact is both the ACLU and MIRC were working with us from the very beginning and often accompanied us during commission meetings and speaking at those meetings saying that the county was under NO legal obligation to cooperate with ICE.) Those subsequent conversations changed everything. The attorneys were able to give us the legal arguments we needed to take to our colleagues to convince them there were legal viewpoints different from what our corporate counsel that allowed the sheriff to take action. Having built some consensus within the Democratic caucus, we went to the new sheriff in an attempt to convince her to end the contract (I had several three-ring binders full of court rulings, legal arguments and media stories on how other communities were working on the issue of disentangling themselves from ICE so they could concentrate on policing their community effectively – knowing me, there probably still down in the basement somewhere). By December, we had strong confidence that the sheriff would let the Contract with ICE lapse without renewal when it expired about a year later, on 30 September 2019. (Skaggs is claiming that the Sheriff’s office would not renew the contract, when in fact ICE chose not to renew it, which is exactly what Sheriff Michelle LaJoye-Young stated during a press conference in August of 2019. Her quote was, “The current contract with ICE will expire on September 30, 2019 as ICE is not seeking to renew the agreement.”) 
Because Republicans had a majority on the County Commission and their caucus was increasingly MAGA, letting the contract lapse was considered the only feasible way to end the sheriff’s special relationship with ICE. No one liked having to wait, but one has to understand constellation of forces (allow me to invoke one of my mantras – “election have consequences”). This opened us up to some painful criticism from some in the activist community, but we were determined to focus on the impacted community as a whole, especially protecting people from deportation because of minor infractions and ending cooperation with ICE that went beyond what was legally required. (Here Skaggs wants to show he was focus on the impacted community, yet the impacted community and allies had been telling him what changes they wanted and he made fund of them. When Skaggs says he wanted to make sure that minor infractions didn’t lead to deportation, this was also completely false. There is no evidence that he did a damn thing to benefit the immigrant communities that were being targeted by ICE while he was a County Commissioner, just like he and his fellow Democrats in 2024 failed to pass driver’s licenses for all.
Then, the event happened which significantly sped up the timeline. Ramos-Gomez was arrested on 21 November 2018 and handed over to ICE on 14 December (he was held in jail beyond his court-ordered release date because of an ICE detainer, despite GR police knowing he held a valid US passport). Ramos-Gomez’s mother hired a lawyer, gave ICE documentation that her son was a US citizen, and Jilmar was released on 17 December. Soon thereafter, the events came to my attention and shortly after that it went public, quickly gaining national attention.
Immediately, I reached out to Commission leadership and the Sheriff and there began a series of seemingly endless phone calls that ended in agreement that the sheriff should seize on the incompetence of ICE on the case and announce that she could no longer in good conscience trust ICE detainer holds and would stop accepting them. (It wasn’t so much the incompetence of ICE in the Jilmar Ramos-Gomez case, but the racial profiling of the GRPD that land him in jail.) At that point, a meeting was held and all Democratic members of the caucus supported the plan and were willing to publicly support the sheriff when she would make her policy change public. I then believed that it was wise to go public with a statement calling on the sheriff to “no longer blindly honor [ICE’s] non-judicial detainer requests” and “terminate the Agreement between the Kent County Sheriff’s Office and ICE.” It was all in the Sheriff’s hands, but we were confident she would do the right thing. (While Skaggs wants to take credit for what happened here, Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE were the ones that made this issue public and spent 14 months pressuring the county and the sheriff to end the contract and end ICE holds.
Concurrent with these talks and public demands, the ACLU and MIRC went public with the legal arguments they had been sharing with us privately. In a 16 January 2019 letter, they pointed out that immigration detainers are optional requests not mandatory arrest warrants signed by a judge, that nothing in Michigan law or the Sheriff’s oath of office required compliance with these administrative, non-judicial holds, and that it had become clear to all in during the Ramos-Gomez case that blindly following ICE detainers was a “recipe for disaster” due to ICE’s error-prone data. Cosecha too revived their demands to end the Contract. Everything was lining up. (Cosecha never revived their demands, they were still demanding an end to the contract and continued to do so until August of 2019, even holding an action outside of the Kent County Jail just days before ICE decided to not renew the contract with Kent County.)
A few days after the meetings and letter, the Sheriff made her statement that effectively ended the Contract by making moot the core part of the agreement – that ICE would pay the jail for the costs of detaining individuals for up to three days beyond their release date.
Immediately, ICE and the Trump White House criticized the Sheriff for promulgating what they called a “sanctuary” policy which they said threatened public safety by not holding immigrants for ICE beyond their release date without a judicial warrant so agents could pick them up and begin the deportation process. However, the Sheriff stood firm in her defense of due process. Nine months later, with little fanfare, the Contract officially lapsed on 30 September 2019, though it had been inactive since that January. (We were still pressuring, which didn’t go unnoticed by ICE, but Skaggs likes to make it about him)
It was a long process, but it effectuated real change for families in West Michigan.
Looking back, I’m filled with gratitude to the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and ACLU of Michigan for getting us the legal information we needed to make our case, to Cosecha who brought the issue forward and relentlessly urged action, to the individuals came to the meetings to tell us their stories, to my colleagues on the County Commission (especially Commission leadership) who each in their own way moved us toward a better policy, and to many others who helped make the success possible. And, of course, special thanks to Sheriff LaJoye-Young for her bravery and leadership.
Epilogues: I recently spoke with former attorneys for Ramos-Gomez and they tell me his mental health has dramatically improved since the difficult times he faced in 2018-2019. I was relieved to hear the news and wish him and his family all the best.
(Again, Skaggs wants to come across as an ally saying thanks to Cosecha, but we know how he treated them during this whole campaign. Interesting that the Sheriff gets to “special thanks” in his comments, which is why he equated the Sheriff with Dr. King instead of Cosecha organizers.
Of course, unfortunately, Trump is back in the White House and his administration (and Speaker Matt Hall) continues to malign Kent County, so many continue to fear punishment from Washington. We’ve seen Trump and ICE punish those they see as political opponents (of even just those that don’t fall in line) in Minneapolis. We all must remain vigilant to prevent such an invasion from coming to our door step. And we must continue to do all we can to stop family separation, racial profiling, the deportation of peaceful people, the attacks on due process for non-citizens and citizens alike, and the violence we’ve seen from an out-of-control agency. You can count on me to do my best and my part to fight back, defend peaceful families, and protect our Constitution. (Here Skaggs make it all about Trump and lets the Democrats off the hook. Skaggs says nothing about the fact that his hero Sheriff LaJoye-Young is again cooperating with ICE and engaging in ICE holds.
Movimiento Cosecha responded to the FB post from Skaggs with these parting comments:
No matter who is in the White House, immigrant families have been separated. Since ICE was created in 2003, the agency has expanded its harm through cooperation with local authorities.
Since the beginning of 2025, Movimiento Cosecha GR and GR Rapid Response to ICE /Respuesta Rápida al ICE have put forward six clear demands to end city and county cooperation with ICE and to stop ICE holds at the Kent County Jail. Every local elected official has dismissed these demands, offering excuses that they “don’t control immigration law.” Our demands do not involve enforcing or changing federal immigration law—they are about local accountability and local choices.
We’ve seen this before. In 2018, when we demanded an “end to the ICE contract”, county commissioners including yourself Phil Skaggs were just as dismissive.
The Kent County Jail continues to carry out ICE holds without judicial warrants. This Sunday morning, a DACA recipient was taken to Kent County Jail during a traffic stop and placed on an ICE hold.
For the past 12 months more and more people are waking up to the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is fundamentally an instrument of state violence.
The ICE murder of Renee Good amplified this reality for a lot of people, although ICE has killed many more people over the years, along with their ongoing arrests, sending people to detention facilities, which often leads to deportation. ICE has been doing this since they were founded in 2003. A major difference this year is that ICE has roughly 7 times more money to operate than in pervious years. For details on the evolution of ICE funding see my previous post.
Rep. Hillary Scholten post a new video which is clearly a response to the ICE killing of Renee Good. You can watch the 4:37 video here.
What Rep. Hillary Scholten has to say about ICE is the standard liberal response for how the federal government needs to respond to federal agencies, transparency and accountability. Sounds nice, but not everyone is so naive as to believe that the US government will practice real transparency or accountability.
At about 1:20 into the video Scholten talks about the number of people who have died in detention in 2025, but fails to mention that people have died in detention in previous years, even under Democratic administrations since ICE was created, specifically 8 years under Obama and 4 years under Biden. The Detention Watch Network has been documenting the people who have died in ICE detention centers since ICE was created. The ACLU has also been documenting and reporting on ICE detention center conditions, which have also been bad for as long as ICE has been around. Rep. Scholten frames ICE abuses to suggest that this is new and that it is only happening under the Trump Administration.
Rep. Scholten then talks about the issue of oversight, which has rarely happened when it comes to federal law enforcement agencies such as ICE. (See Silky Shah’s book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.) Scholten continues to lay the blame at the feature of Republicans regarding ICE behavior in the video, but says she will do everything in her power to hold ICE accountable. This is standard political speak that translates into something like this – I can’t do anything because Democrats are not in power. The reality is that since ICE was created in 2003, the Obama and Biden administration, the years when Democrats also had a majority in Congress, did nothing to provide transparency, accountability or oversight of ICE.
Rep. Scholten concludes her remarks by saying that Congress has a responsibility to hold ICE accountable, which has never happened. More importantly, Rep. Scholten is not paying attention to polling which shows that a growing number of people in the US want to abolish ICE. ICE is only been around for 22 years and didn’t really have a significant problem with undocumented immigrants committing violence crimes prior to ICE being created, simply because immigrants don’t commit crime anywhere near the rate that US citizens do.
Lastly, Rep. Scholten fails to mention that she too has not been held accountable for her votes on immigration matters, such as voting for the Laken Riley Act at the beginning of 2025, legislation that further criminalized immigrants. In late January of 2025, Rep. Scholten voted for H.R. 30, which also criminalizes immigrants as I noted then. Then again in February of 2025, Rep., Scholten voted for HR 35, which also further criminalizes immigrants.
For as much as Rep. Scholten likes to remind us that she was an immigration lawyer, she continues to vote for policies that further criminalizes undocumented immigrants, and policies that the Republicans introduced. How could anyone take her seriously when it comes to accountability of ICE, especially with her voting record on immigration matters.
On Monday morning the group Together West Michigan held a Press Conference at a church in Grand Rapids to address an important topic – the violence that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is perpetrating against immigrant communities.
I was not able to attend this event, but I have read their statement and want to speak to that in particular.
The statement they released, and encouraged others to sign on to, is entitled, A Time for Light to Shine. Again, I am grateful that this group is making immigration, immigrants and ICE a public issue, especially since we have to examine and confront the non-stop terrorizing of immigrants by ICE in West Michigan and across the country.
Having said that I am a bit deflated and discouraged by their statement, which is rather vague and too tepid for what we know about ICE. I write this critique of their statement because I know that immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants need the faith community right now and right now they need to be bold.
Part of the Together West Michigan statement reads:
- We call on ICE and all of those working with ICE to be people of the light, operating in the daylight and removing masks.
- We call on ICE and all of those working with ICE to allow each person they encounter to shed light upon their status—those who have passed initial asylum interviews and await their day in court, those refugees who have resettled in this area, those who are black or brown and are subject to racial profiling.
- We call on ICE and all of those working with ICE to be caring light to families who may have one or more members who are undocumented.
These statements are not bad statements, but I believe that they are problematic in two ways. First, the call is to ICE and those working with ICE to be people of light. I understand the sentiment, but ICE and those collaborating with ICE are inherently systems of oppression, indeed they are an instrument of state carceral violence. This is why immigrants, immigrant justice groups and a growing number people across the country are calling for ICE to be abolished.
Second, the tone of these sentences centers ICE and their accomplices to be agents of change. It’s as if those who wrote this statement want ICE to simply be more humane and kind. This sentiment ignores the history of ICE, which was created after 9/11 with the specific intent to criminalize and terrorize undocumented immigrants.
Another section of the statement reads:
- We call on commissioners and legislators at the local, state and federal level to use their light to review and hold accountable actions that dehumanize our neighbors and fracture their families.
- We call on commissioners and legislators at the local, state and federal level to cast light on the racist actions that have extinguished the light of hope the United States’ resettlement program has provided to refugees around the world.
- We call on legislators at the state and federal level to remove obstacles to H1B (specialized workers) and F1 (student) visas so that these newcomers can shine their lights in ways that further not only their own skills, but advance our country.
Again, these statements are not bad statements, but they center politicians and not the affected communities. I acknowledge that there are some (few) elected officials at the local, state and federal level that have been appalled by the actions of ICE and other immigration policies, but the overwhelming majority of elected officials have voted for funding of ICE and bad and oppressive immigration policies.
A third section of the statement reads:
- We call on houses of worship to be the light they are called to be, casting light on evil and flooding our community with acceptance and goodwill.
- We call on houses of worship to be the light they are called to be, assisting those who are burdened, because of anti-immigrant propaganda and activity, with material, emotional, and spiritual support.
- We call on houses of worship to provide open doors and acceptance to those desperately in need of hope and sanctuary.
These sentences are more to the point, especially the last two lines, which provide concrete actions that houses of worship can take to practice solidarity with undocumented immigrants. Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have a sanctuary team that is meeting with local faith communities to talk about offering sanctuary and what that looks like.
What we need from faith communities is to adopt the same kind of commitment that the Confessing Church did in Nazi Germany, which took a strong public stance against state violence and offered sanctuary and safe houses to Jewish people and other communities that were being targeted by the Hitler regime.
I was also disappointed that the statement did not include or encourage people of faith to join the campaigns that Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE have that is calling on the City of Grand Rapids and the Kent County government to adopt 6 sanctuary policies that would help reduce some of the violence that ICE is perpetrating in this community. These 6 sanctuary policies are concrete and come directly from the immigrant-led movement that Cosecha has been leading in this community since 2017.
The six sanctuary policies that Cosecha is demanding are:
- Policies restricting the ability of state and local police to make arrests for federal immigration violations, or to detain individuals on civil immigration warrants.
- Policies restricting the police or other county workers from asking about immigration status.
- Policies prohibiting “287(g)” agreements through which ICE deputizes local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law.
- Policies that prevent local governments from entering into a contract with the federal government to hold immigrants in detention.
- Policies preventing immigration detention centers from being established in Kent County, which would include the use of the Kent County Jail as a detention facility for ICE.
- A policy that will not allow the Kent County Sheriff’s Department to share Flock camera images or any other information gathered by county staff with ICE or any other law enforcement agency seeking to arrest, detain and deport immigrants.
In this existential moment, where ICE agents are terrorizing immigrants by kidnapping them, detaining them and deporting them, faith communities could play a vital role in being part of the resistance to state violence.
Again, I write these words not as criticism, but as an invitation to be part of the resistance work that is so necessary in this community. Let’s be bold in our words and our actions, even if it means we take risks to our own well being. As Archbishop Oscar Romero reminds us, “We must not love our lives so much that we avoid taking risks in life that history calls for.” History is calling for it NOW!
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 